Ever since we got my 13-year old an iPad, he's gone up to his bedroom after dinner each night and asked us to not disturb him while he "creates a document." Today I learned from Bill Gates that he can't actually create a document.

techfun89 writes: "The wait may finally be over for the rumored Google Drive or GDrive. GigaOm's Om Malik says that it will be launched the first week of April.

"According to the details from my sources, Google is going to offer 1 GB of storage space for free, but will charge for more storage. The market leader Dropbox currently offers 2 GB for free. Google's product will come with a local client and the web interface will look much like the Google Docs interface. Interestingly, it will launch for Google Apps customers and will be domain specific as well. Google has also built an API for third party apps with this service so folks can store content from other apps in the Google drive. My sources are impressed, so far with what they have seen."

Google has fumbled in the past like with their initial release of Google Music without any record labels, which they later fixed. Google Play could to have ties to GDrive for storing things like digital movie content. So the potential exists for big results from Google Drive."Link to Original Source

An anonymous reader writes: A new study examining nearly 40 years of satellite imagery has revealed that the floating ice shelves of a critical portion of West Antarctica are steadily losing their grip on adjacent bay walls, potentially amplifying an already accelerating loss of ice to the sea.Link to Original Source

LetterRip writes: "Students you can now apply for the Google Summer of Code. A number of great organizations with fun projects to work on such as Blender, GIMP, GNOME and APACHE. Applications are due by April 6th at 19:00 UTC. Looking forward to your applications, and good luck."

My kids don't mind programming. They both used Alice http://alice.org/ and were meh about it and didn't go back (about two years ago).

They both like Scratch http://scratch.mit.edu and the 12 year old has moved on to building his own blocks in the Squeak interface underneath it -- so as a starter language I think it has done exactly what we'd like it to do. He's now looking forward to learning python, probably using the media computation materials from Guzdial/Ericson.

The 9 year old actually prefers Microsoft's Kodu http://research.microsoft.com/en-us/projects/kodu/.

I'm thinking about working them through some of the material at Bootstrap http://www.bootstrapworld.org/ which is teachScheme for kids.